World's richest 1% gained $40 tn in a decade: Oxfam
(www.france24.com)
from alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 25 Jul 2024 13:03
https://sh.itjust.works/post/22745877
from alphacyberranger@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 25 Jul 2024 13:03
https://sh.itjust.works/post/22745877
#world
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Bet they would taste delicious in a stew.
It would have a very rich flavor.
See, people keep saying to “eat the rich.” I say “beat the rich.” Not only is it more satisfying, you can do it repeatedly. You can only eat them once.
You can eat them after you beat them. The tenderization helps.
Trebuchets are easily constructed from readily available materials. They require no permits to own or operate, and are capable of flinging the fattest of fat cats well over 100 yards.
#YeetTheRich
#PumpkinChuckinUsingFatcats
The superior siege weapon.
The post above this one in All for me is the one about a guy inviting women back to his place for delicious stew. Now I want to know what the secret ingredient is.
That is exactly why I was thinking about stew
I found the guy!
lemmy.world/post/17938701
I think the idea of cryptocurrency is funny, since it’s just “I’m not playing your make believe money anymore, so we’ll pay our own make believe money since you are obviously rigging the system”. Kinda makes sense if adoption keeps up and the planet isn’t on fire
Thing is, the poor aren’t running bitcoin miner farms. Crypto doesn’t change anything but traceability of the funds, letting the rich get even richer.
Yeah riding the bubble let a couple of nerds and early investors maybe take advantage of a little economic mobility, like, incidentally. But those days are long passed now. Like you said, it’s rigged in favour of entrenched capital, just like everything else now.
BTC is steady last few months at 60k, if you purchased last year, your investment is up 3x. If you bought 2 years ago at the peak, you’re up a few %, which still beats international inflation
So you’re saying “too bad for you if you didn’t get in at the right time”?
That is 100% the crypto mentality. I got mine fuck you if you didn’t.
I guess some people have that stance, but it’s a currency. It’s supposed to be boring and not thought about much. It’s not like most people care about antique and rare coin collections, but some people do, most people just spend and save their money
Calling it a currency is generous. I know it’s meant to be, but let’s be honest - you’re not buying the majority, or probably even any, everyday goods or tech with your BTC are you? Most people certainly aren’t. And most BTC owners certainly aren’t. They’re holding to the moon.
If my local grocery story would accept it, I would. It’s a compatibility issue, which all technology is tested this way. Having 5G towers in the 1900s would have been a bummer, but today, somewhat standard. Crypto will need to pass this test if it’ll survive
Do you know what a blockchain is? It’s not cutting edge technology at all.
You’re right though, there is a compatibility problem.The BTC network is designed to be inefficient and it’s slow as fuck. Why would we replace a fast and pretty efficient system with a slow one that also makes your money unrecoverable if you make a typo?
That’s not even touching on how fun it would be to buy your groceries when BTC crashes 20% overnight.
Or how ridiculously convoluted using crypto is in general. And how easy it is to get hacked, scammed, rug pulled.
It’s complete fantasy mate. I’m guessing you’re deep in the crypto space from your comments, which are the same old non arguements over and over, so no one ever talks about any potential negatives. That in itself should tell you everything you need to know.
I’m not saying you can’t make money with crypto, but it’s a casino and nothing more. The rest is just feel good bullshit sold to you to make you buy and hold, generally.
Well, most of our current economic payment system is smoke and mirrors for the majority of the world. In the US, bank transfers can take up to weeks to process, and the only reason why it looks fast to end users is it’s insured so they just change the digits on the screen
I’m not necessarily sold on crypto, I am just over the fiat system. Living through multiple economic collapses, seeing prices rise and only held low due to government supplements and corrupt lobbying, and the general way fiat leads to over consumption will do that
Give me something better and I’ll take it. I know it’s slower than cash, clunky and uses as much resources as google, but right now those aren’t draw backs to me in this current environment where we need debt to sustain day to day existence
You know bank transfers are almost instant across most of Europe right?
That’s a US specific problem. Solutions already exist.
Yes, there are serious problems with the current system. I hear you, and I agree.
Fiat isn’t the problem. These are problems with human behaviour, lack of oversight, and a system that incentivises bad practice.
Crypto does nothing to fix any of them, and in most cases simply makes them worse. It’s not a solution, it’s just touted as one by the crypto rich to bring in new money.
Just look at the rhetoric vs reality. It’s not ok for governments to just print money on demand, but it is ok for Tether to print Tether on demand which they then use to buy shitloads of BTC to pump and dump the market?
It’s the same shit, just even worse.
We’re all being fucked over by the same ultra rich, and technology is not the answer to that.
Voting in and supporting people who want to start taxing these fuckers and holding them to account is a step in the right direction.
Yeah there are lots of bad actors in the crypto sector, similar patterns existed in the US when towns and companies were issuing their own currencies
And yeah the US and many developing nations have old infrastructure, the EU and China have the pinnacles of fiat payment systems, but the roll out for upgrades are low and expensive
I couldn’t agree more, it’s a human issue. I think a finite transparent currency would be useful since it would squash the worst actors (fraud, embezzlement and hidden budgets, in the private and public sectors), but that’s just my guess
I think more importantly is community and having conversations like these because nothing is a “silver bullet” and we should better as a species. Thanks for chatting, you seem cool
Yep I definitely agree with your last point. And likewise, appreciate that we could have a discussion about this sensibly. Not sure a finite currency would solve these issues as they are human issues. My take would be addressing the human aspect of these problems through education, which is to be fair pretty unlikely to happen.
As you say though conversation is the way forward, whether we’re taking about crypto or anything else. Cheers :)
No, it’s like any other currency minus it has a fixed supply. So use it, since inflation is eating away any currency with a limitless supply
But deflation pushes people not to spend their money and crypto with a fixed supply is in fact deflationary since the accessible supply goes down as people lose access to their wallet for one reason or another.
Also, crypto value and crypto prices of items are based on the comparable fiat value so yes, getting in at the right time makes a huge difference.
In the end crypto bros just make it so there’s still rich people at the top, they’re just not necessarily the same ones.
Yes if you meet those criteria and cash out right now. Most people I to crypto will hold though.
Why? Because that’s the narrative pushed on the community over and over and over - hodl never sell.
Why? Because if everyone sells, all the people manipulating the market like Tether and their buddies lose their money. Fair play to those that can make a bit of money, but unless you’re already rich, are running the market, or fine with creating a shitcoin to rug people, crypto is not going to make most average people rich at all.
Just another way for the already wealthy to fuck you over.
Most assets work that way, if everyone sold Nividia stock then it would tank as well. Most things outside of food and shelter only have value due to our collective belief. Diamond and water paradox is constant in society
Is it a currency or an asset? You replied claiming it’s a currency below.
I think an asset is anything that can be converted to liquid, so that depends if you think crypto is liquid or not, which probably depends on location
So you think it’s an asset, not a currency?
It doesn’t matter what I believe, I was referencing an economic textbook on what an asset and currency are
What do you believe it to be?
It does matter, because with respect you changed what you class it as to support your arguement. Obviously there’s still discussion on how to class BTC, but my understanding is the consensus outside of crypto is it’s a speculative asset.
That’s also why it would be terrible as a currency, from what I understand.
Traceability might be nice since the black market is estimated around 20T USD. Cuts out bad actors which means no fraud, and no hidden inflation since we can see the quantity compared to USD which the Federal Reserve doesn’t even know
Have you heard of our Lord and Savior, Monero?
That’s a common misconception. Most cryptocurrencies (except XMR) actually increase the traceability of funds compared to traditional payments. Bitcoin really isn’t that great for privacy as some crypto enthousiasts say. It’s one of those ridicolous “advantages” that prove that most are just hypemen with no idea about how it actually works. </rant>
It doesn’t solve any of this. The people who invented BTC did not understand whay money is and how it works. Especially how it’s created. If we lived in a world with BTC alone and we’ve reached the point where no more BTC can be created while the world economy was growing, we’d keep creating money by reducing prices and using smaller fractions of BTC to pay them. Of course all of this would be much less practical than adding more units of BTC so if the world lived in this universe, a consensus would be reached to amend BTC to allow for further expansion of the BTC supply. And this doesn’t even touch the ability to create money via debt which doesn’t even require a currency.
BTW I’m not saying crypto is useless. I think BTC for example will be with us for the foreseeable future but it would likely always be used as an intermediate currency that is then converted to one fiat or another through a floating exchange rate. The exchange rate would take care of the inherent problem I described.
I think the creators had some knowledge of how currency worked, since there has been movements to make digital money in the cryptopunk scene for 20+ years before BTC. Also, you don’t need a degree to be an economist, a library card works just as good
Having a fixed supply might reduce astronomical debts but still allow for smaller debts or ones that are collateralized. But yeah, day to day life would be drastically different. No credit cards for sure, but also no compound interest, because can’t have compounding interest on anything with a fixed supply or it will acquire all of the resource (or at least attempt to)
But the ultra rich are actually playing with that too and fucking over every single person that invests thinking they’re going to be ‘financially free’
Adoption will never happen because block chains are shit at everything except being a Blockchain.
Let’s fix the system we’ve got instead of inventing a new one that’s worse in basically every way.
It’s never enough.
But a B-List actor told me it would trickle down half a century ago, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe we’ll catch a dribble
And he was right. You get a trickle down. He didn’t mention the industrial strength wealth pump going up with the business end stuck in your wallet.
That’s only like a half million each…
I was asking myself, how much money do you need to have, to be in the top 1%?
So for context, according to this article, you are in the top 1% worldwide, if your net worth is above ~872’000.-, that is 19 million US Americans.
With 94’000.- you are in the top 10%
What if your net worth is -$50,000? Asking for a friend…
The top 10% includes the majority of people in the western world. We have been lied to by the select few above us that we have more in common with them than we do with the bottom 90% in the rest of the world.
In terms of lifestyle we definitely do. To go from a retail worker living in a typical US apartment to a jet-setting billionaire with a superyacht is a big jump in quality of life but it’s FAR less than going from a dirt-floored shack in central Africa to the apartment in the US.
Both the retail worker and the billionaire can enjoy healthy food, clean drinking water, access to medicine, electricity, a shower any time, a smartphone with unlimited data, a home PC with unlimited internet, Netflix, Amazon, Uber Eats… These are all luxuries beyond what even a king from two centuries ago could dream of, and they’re available to anyone on a minimum wage retail job and a bit of budgeting skills.
Meanwhile the poor shack-dweller faces unimaginable grinding poverty, no running water, no medicine, rampant disease, war, slavery (conflict minerals) and prostitution.
The problem with billionaires isn’t how luxurious their yachts are. It’s how much power their wealth gives them and how unaccountable they are for it. Heck, you can probably see posts on Lemmy every day about the stuff Elon Musk is doing.
Right. I wish they would start using the more accurate figure of .01% for articles like this. The 1%-.011% are successful upper class households, none of which are Billionaires. The .01% is all the billionaires.
Its a built in feedback loop. Under capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So its naturally going to concentrate.
We need hard caps on wealth
Not sure how you achieve that in a world with multiple nations though. Capital is naturally pretty mobile.
G20 is currently holding negotiations to start imposing a minimum tax on billionaires, guess which country is against that…
Vatican City? Please, please be Vatican City.
(I know it isn’t)
Ban export of capital.
How do you see it play out if we say, in the US, any wealth over the cap gets taxed away.
It will only cause more capital to go to tax havens.
Still count it towards their wealth
The reason billionaires exist is because people like you and me are overcharged for everything we purchase so they can accumulate the surplus.
The reason why we don’t do anything about it is because we evaluate that we get good value for our money in most situations.
What is that evaluation based on? Our past experiences…
But the only experiences we have to evaluate what our money is worth is us being charged enough that the rich people at the top accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth.
We never have an experience where those leeches at the top aren’t present to artificially inflate the price of things so we can actually realize how much we’re supposed to be able to get for our money!
Temu opened my eyes.
8$ for 4 sponges at Target, no more for me.
I’ve tried Temu a few times. The quality is such garbage even calling it Chinese crap doesn’t do it justice. It’s basically from doorstep to landfill.
It’s literally the same drop shipped stuff on temu. You can order from “local warehouses” and it’s literally the same products. Amazon USES drop shipping. They don’t own it.
Sometimes it is, other times it isn’t. You won’t know until you test your blood heavy metal levels. If you’re touching it or if it touches what you’re eating, it may not be worth finding out. And no I’m not comparing noname sponges from Amazon. I’m comparing noname sponges from a local retailer or brand name stuff like 3M ScotchBrite, etc.
Ok but the 50 dollar mp3 player on amazon is literally the exact same drop shipped 23$ mp3 player on temu. It’s the same. Drop shipping doesn’t have some factory stock being good and some factory stock being bad. That’s not how drop shipping works. It’s literally the same products available from the same warehouses just on different storefronts, for different prices.
White label producers also have range of options, often including quality. They’re usually going to be the same case because changing that would need new molds and molds are expensive but you can cheap out a lot when buying electronic components and probably don’t even have to re-program the pick+place machine, just throw in a reel of say bargain-bin reject flash chips in the machine instead of the good stuff.
And, of course, the cheap options might actually be the better one. It’s literally impossible to tell, as a consumer.
When it comes to Chinese products my advise to avoid all white-label stuff.
Absolutely can be and in those cases you’re getting the same thing good or bad or anywhere inbetween. Dropshippers, including the rebranding dropshippers (like Volta cables) are pure exploitation. They do very little “service” for the money they take.
I think this says more about how far Amazon has fallen than a statement of quality about Temu.
I’m not using either if I can help it.
Yeah I didn’t think Chinese knockoffs could get any worse.
Many products on there basically copy photos of a product and replicate how it looks with the cheapest materials possible.
I got a few good deals but understand it’s NOT going to be high quality tier stuff
So I buy things I’m willing to just toss if it’s no good. I do a refund and they’ll tell me to keep it. Then it goes into the trash.
6 for 75ct. Eurocent, so in USD it’s a whopping 81ct. Tax inclusive. Available in both scratchy and gentle.
If supermarkets get away with charging those kinds of prices there’s two things to do: a) Raid each and every HQ to see whether you can nail them for collusion, b) price controls.
Overcharged and underpaid. They’re dipping from both ends.
We wouldn’t be underpaid if things were priced according to their actual cost because the actual cost of things is based on the low salary that people make!
Yet we produce more than ever per hour. So by that account either prices should decrease over time to reflect that, or our wages should be going up. :D
Exactly, prices should go down over time as output increases for the same amount of labor!
And we are paying taxes. The only money they give to the government is directly to the pockets of judges and politicians to make decisions against our best interest and to make them richer.
Just imagine the housing market…
Perhaps my first controversial post here. Hmm. No, I’ll be decent. But seriously? Fuck the elites. Fuck them hard.
<img alt="" src="https://therionarms.com/reenact/therionarms_c1525j.jpg">
Up the butt or dick hole?
<img alt="" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60451868/99850942-1d4f6100-2b33-11eb-8609-8d56601a287c.gif">
Careful or they’ll mute you for inciting violence
Not good to see but not a giant shock.
Twitter mob: Protect rich minority at all cost! Feed the billioners!
The rich are the most oppressed minority! /s
Taxes won’t fixe this, but an 18th century invention might.
As long as the rich have the means of wealth generation they will always come ahead no matter how much you tax them. They will always buy back the system. Now if those means were somehow communalized then things could change once and for all.
This is a completely meaningless figure…
I really hate when articles come out with this kind of data. Huge numbers like this without any context just mean nothing. Ok, 42 trillion$, how much money did they already have? How much percent did their fortunes increase? Is that more or less than inflation?
It’s just a meaningless huge number that has no intention other than to shock, certainly not to inform or they would have given actually useful numbers that would actually let you have an idea whether it’s that bad or not…
I hate that people keep falling for nonsens like this… Just post a huge number without any context or any other numbers needed to be able to make sense of it, and everyone is like “omfgwtfbbq, this is SOOOO bad”! Is it? It’s perfectly possible that this isn’t even enough to keep up with inflation, and they’re technically poorer, probably not, but we’ll never know from this useless article…
Your right. We need names & addresses.
Ladies and gentlemen, gather 'round and see the spectacular boot-swallowing man!
Ah yes, i can’t critisize such stupid articles without opposing their message… I’d love more equality, and agree that something should be done about it.
I just would love to see actually useful numbers that mean something when we make a fuss about it rather than useless info like this that is meaningless.
How you interpreted my message as bootlicking is beyond me, but i guess you’re a youngling that interprets any critique as an attack?
what are they going to do with all that money?
hint: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6f87217d-b7fc-40b3-b897-cf63b64b151c.png">
buy more private jets?
Slavery & Slaughter
imf.org/…/inside-the-world-of-global-tax-havens-a…
This is old data. The well of souls being hoarded is inconceivable.
mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Spaaaace! So much space. Gotta see it all.
Makes me hungry.
Oxfam is garbage
Nah but it’s the poor woman and child fleeing crime & poverty from south of the border who is the problem!!! /s
Le capitalisme
Scrooge McDuck ass economy
Tax Reform Act of 1986
Name and shame: Ronald Reagan